The power to be still

What story is your emergency? That’s the only one worth writing. Don’t defer life. Don’t delay your most urgent messages. No tomorrow is given. 
Sophie Strand

I find myself standing at the edge of vulnerability. Again. Searching for the echoes of who I am. Again. Fifteen years ago, I walked away from everything I knew,
chasing a different life, a new horizon. I came here to build a family, weave safe havens from the threads of the unknown, crafted a home in the quiet embrace of a forest in Norway.

Looking back, times felt like unraveling, a shedding of skin of a sort, and a real surrender. I was brave. I stripped away language, friendships, familiar foods, habits, life rhythms, and the city landscapes I only knew. Every piece of me was reshaped. I abandoned the familiar, rewrote the map of my body, let the wind carve new patterns into my soul.

And yet, back then, it felt effortless. Beautiful, even. I was fearless, I had just become a mother, cradling new life in my arms. Nothing was frightening. Nothing could touch me.

The forest just outside our house.

I was invincible.

Living in a forest is more than a place on a map, more than cartography or topography.
It is lineage. It is roots. It is the quiet architecture of existence itself. Among the trees, roots are a given—woven into the earth like veins, threading the past into the present, grounding you in something older than time. But the forest offers more than just belonging; it opens a deeper path inward, a passage into the self.

To live inside a forest is to inherit visions, to awaken quiet powers.
The power to be still.
The power to watch without wanting.
The power to need nothing more.
The power to feel contained, whole, untouched by the urgency of the world.
The power of silence.

The power of slower movements.

Alfie making kin with trees (photo taken in 2020)

Yet, this kind of power has weight.
Stillness can turn into stagnation. It can root you so deeply that you forget how to move.
It can hold you so tight that you become stuck. Containment like captivity.
Roots can entangle, hold too fast.
And then, the forest—vast, endless—can make you feel small. Stuck.

I have been attuned to the energies and vibrations of this land. It never feels empty. I can go days without seeing another soul, yet loneliness never finds me. Instead, I often feel surrounded—sometimes even invaded—by the presence of the birds, the grass, the rocks, the very air itself. Everything here moves, breathes, pulses with life. For a girl who once only knew and belonged to the city, this existence is nothing short of ecstatic.

I was shaped for a different world, yet here, I have grown wings—and fur and perhaps even horns.

🪽

I find myself needing to dig deeper into my psyche. And in doing so, I see it clearly: there is more for me. So much more. More meaningful ways of being, unfolding in ways I have yet to grasp. But at the crossroads, so many doubts and questions arise. At the crossroads, I feel lost.

My suffering is not separate from the world’s suffering. The pain of my child is not separate from mine. And neither is yours.

I was fortunate enough to have begun this journey of self enquiry before the start of this new cycle. So even if my academic job will come to an end soon, the path ahead will grow more intense, more strange, more persistent. It will get harder—deeper, to the core.

Those of us who embark on the journey of soul work, ancestral healing, or seek to live differently—exploring other paths, often guided by invisible forces—understand well that it is a slow, winding process, one that demands time and patience.

You long to see the full plant emerge from the seed sown yesterday, but it remains hidden in the earth, still waiting to rise.

Everyday, I’m reminded there are no shortcuts, no way to lie around your real feelings and longings…. And yet, time and patience can be painful. Each day holds a new lesson - specially the one of surrendering, of letting go.

Because from where I stand now, the terrain has already changed dramatically. I feel it in my body – I feel it physically. Sometimes, I feel it so intense that I have real acute pain. But I don´t know where exactly I am aching. I know this is weird. It is as if there are no props for performance. Only a single movement from nowhere to nowhere.

The people I once felt compelled to impress are ghosts from another life. The external markers and status have fallen away. In my new world, growth is only possible through the inside, through a continual patience, by following a curriculum of unlearning, and by owning the truth arising from the silence. I am no longer the same.

We live in a culture that wants things done before the idea is even fully formed. Our need for instant gratification is evidenced in our addiction to outcomes and the co-dependency between our sense of value and the external validation we receive. We are intolerant of what takes time, what goes deep, and the things that allow us to grow.

But only within the sacred ground of waiting can any meaningful transformation take root.

2 beautiful images from the artist jana heidersdorf